Why did people buy the Apple High Resolution Monochrome monitor?

[@adriansdigitalbasement2]

Lots of great stuff from my Patrons: Here is a super comprehensive review of monochrome monitors. It turns out Apple charged over $1000 for this monitor in 1990, which seems a bit outrageous. MacWorld strongly pushed readers towards larger models: "A few monochrome monitors can't display even one full page. The Apple High Resolution Monochrome Monitor, at 640 by 480, and Relax's NEC Monograph System, at 768 by 767, are two examples. Choose one of these monitors only if other characteristics, such as the relatively compact size of the Apple display, heavily outweigh displayed page area in your calculations." archive.org/details/MacWorld_9004_April_1990/page/n135/mode/2up Next up I found this article that indicates this 12" monitor was only sold from 1988 to 1991, so it was clearly not popular or particularly useful. (Being that if you wanted to get work done in the publishing business, you would be much better off with full page or two page displays.) This page says the monitor was under $900 but Macworld seems to contraindicate this.... Macworld says the monitor was only $399 without a video card (For use with the Mac IIci) or $1047 with a paired video card. siliconfeatures.com/apple-high-resolution-monochrome-monitor/ Apple later released the M1050 which was a Monochrome monitor designed for the Macintosh LC line of computers. (It looked exactly like the low cost Mac LC color monitor they also released.) The M1050 appeared to carry on until 1993. It is unclear how these two monitors compare (beyond the obvious physical differences.) The M1050 was called simply "Apple Monochrome Monitor" while the M0400 seen here was the "Apple High Resolution Monochrome Monitor" -- both had the same 640x480 resolution. cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/computing/apple_hardware_devnotes/Mac%20IIci.pdf Technical documentation from the Mac IIci indicate that when operating in 640x480 color mode, it only outputs a C-Sync signal. This means that most VGA monitors would need a small additional circuit to be a sync separator, or the monitor would need to support C-Sync directly. (I'm not sure how common this was...) See page 56. These days, I've found most LCD panels with VGA input seem to work fine with my IIci, so that means they must support C-Sync. A little box to do this would have been a good accessory to sell so people could access inexpensive VGA monitors on these early Macs.

[@douro20]

If it were higher resolution, like 800x600 or 1024x768, I could understand it.

[@nickwallette6201]

It wasn't outrageous ... that's the price for both the monitor and a video card to drive it, as you mentioned in the second paragraph. The monitor alone was $399, which is expensive, but not out of the question. Apple was pushing much lower quantities than the PC clone market; they were targeting the professional market with higher standards and bigger budgets; and there wasn't nearly the range of choice. (Some PC monitors claimed to be compatible with Mac, with an adapter, but only the better -- and more expensive -- brands tended to even mention this, so who knows whether a given PC monitor would work.) Good PC monitors weren't exactly free back then either. :-) I have a 1991 Computer Shopper on my desk here, and comparable Apple monitors seem to be about 50-100% more than generic PC equivalents. (PC 768i or 600p ~ $350; Mac RGB 12" ~ $450, RGB 13" ~ $690.) The nice stuff, like NEC, Viewsonic, Hitachi, etc... that would be higher.

[@HansCampbell]

The Macintosh IIcx and IIci normally sold with the Apple Monochrome monitor. The Apple High Resolution Color monitor was optional. It was not needed for office productivity software, desktop publishing, or MIDI music. The Apple Monochrome monitor required an Apple "monochrome graphics" card. My Macintosh IIcx computer came with the Apple Monochrome monitor and card. I will show them, and talk more about them, on my channel. 😃

[@TheBurvis]

The reason for a B/W monitor back then was to get the 256 shades of grey, especially if you were in publishing. Most print was B/W, with various screen types for shading. When you did the page or image processin on a B/W monitor, you could see the images in mostly correct greyscale. This was not possible with a color monitor unless you spent a ton of money on a graphics card that could do milliions of colors. But even those cards were often used to drive B/W full page or two page displays. Millions of colors was slow to update a page, however when run at 8bit B/W, screen updates were fast. DTP on a fullpage or two page display was glorious!

[@osliverpool]

I was doing Mac software dev back then, and many of us preferred the monochrome monitor as a second text-only debugging monitor. For a day of doing text-only work, the monochrome was a lot better on my eyes (even than a Trinitron color monitor). A lot of users doing text-only publishing work preferred the mono too - it was definitely sharper, and color wasn't necessarily a benefit.

[@macdaddyns]

I was a Apple SE and support specialist in Halifax and can tell you the majority of customers were Gov Labs, Defense, Environment, Education and Desktop Publishing. 60% of customers chose the greyscale monitor and some added the video card for two monitors , one being colour. Very reliable and well loved!

[@bradnelson3595]

Good points. And before commercial color printing became relatively inexpensive, what we then called "desktop publishing" covered a huge market where all you needed was black-and-white (or grayscale) -- for newspaper ads, newsletters, and even silkscreen production. And that second monitor add-on for color was very common, as you noted. But just the grayscale monitor was enough for many tasks.

[@bobweiram6321]

Those machines had killer looks and would just make you green with envy and lust. Apple always knew how to present a product!

[@CasualSpud]

How long ago was this? I remember using Macs at Dal and QEH back in the late 80's.

[@macdaddyns]

@@CasualSpud I was in the field from '86 to 2000 and worked on some of the more difficult issue for Dal and the Mount,but, they had their own techs. I was one of two trained on the Lisa MAC products as well. Cheers

[@denisconnolly5064]

There was a significant advantage enjoyed by mono CRT monitors. Resolution was not reduced by the shadowmask or aperture grille found in color CRT's, therefore a well designed mono CRT offered superb fine resolution images that were then unavailable in colour. I designed and sold adapters that would couple a legacy mono CRT display to a modern SVGA card. However it wasn't long before the video card manufacturers stopped supporting mono displays in their drivers and that ended the project.

[@kaitlyn__L]

I vaguely recall, when I watched all the Computer Chronicles archive a few years back, seeing an interview with someone in desktop publishing who said even though the colour dot pitch technically resolved there were still slight colour fringes around all black text and so he preferred the B&W except for final photo/graphics checks.

[@pauledwards2817]

I do have to absolutely agree that I would have rather had a pin sharp, perfect focus and geometry mono/amber/green screen over the early vga/ega/cga monitors that were either fantastically expensive or just very poor. A good mono screen was close to the quality of the plasma displays famously used in the toshiba laptops

[@The8BitGuy]

I'm actually sort of surprised that monochrome monitors were not more popular in the 90s. Most of the time, I never even saw monochrome monitors in computer stores. But in magazines like Computer Shopper, you could buy monochrome VGA monitors for about a 3rd of the price of a color monitor. And I know a lot of people that bought them for their "other PC" in the house, or for test benches, or whatever. Considering a color VGA monitor was often $300 or $400 for a basic 13 inch, I think a lot of people would have easily settled for a monochrome monitor for $99 had they been more widely available.

[@adriansdigitalbasement2]

My recollection back then was similar about VGA monochrome monitors, they seemed mainly used for servers and point of sale terminals but we're hardly targeted at consumers. I found an article about this monitor and it was reportedly $900 when it came out in 1989 and discontinued by 1991. No wonder no one bought it for that price!

[@BollingHolt]

Good point. I pretty much only remember the MDA/Hercules mono cards back then. In 1993, when I was still a kid and was able to get free parts donated to me because I was a kid, I wound up building a bunch of 286 machines with Hercules cards and monochrome monitors for like $300 a pop. That was pretty good money for a 12 year old! Of course, I used all the money to put into my then-new 486, the first computer that I ever built. I think one of the first things I got was the Mitsumi single-speed CD-ROM drive.... but I digress ;)

[@Linuxpunk81]

📎📎📎📎💥

[@olepigeon]

I seem to recall (on the Macintosh, anyway) that monochrome was also a popular option for full-page & two-page displays (19" and up) as a second monitor to the smaller color monitor. It was an economical way to get much needed space for desktop publishing and layout, with the smaller monitor used for color proofing and preview.

[@steveftoth]

Most of the ui that was non mac was designed around color though and the black and white modes were afterthoughts so the experience was not ideal.

[@timstuart7112]

I had a Mac II that I purchased in 1988 for $5k. It came with a single floppy and no hard drive. I had purchased a Princeton Multi sync monitor and a cable made for that monitor that would plug right into the Mac. I added an external 40 MB SCSI hard drive and upgraded to 16 MB ram. All in I was north of $6k…in 1988. I have never spent that much on a computer since let alone in todays dollars. Two years later I sold it for $2500 😢. Regarding the monochrome screen, around 1990 my mom worked for a magazine and they used exclusively monochrome monitors with their Macs. I asked her why they didn’t use color and she said since their magazine was strictly black and white they could get accurate screen to paper representation with the monochrome screens and couldn’t with the color. Plus on the large 20” screens they were using it was a lot sharper. My take away was the monochrome was better for desktop publishing.

[@hessex1899]

I worked on one of these back in the day. In 16 shades of grey it was considerably faster than 256 grey or 256 color using the on board graphics. It was also very easy to look at for long periods of time. I can see someone working at a newspaper or even doing software development or technical work that does not need color preferring this to a color screen that's limited to 8 bit graphics.

[@pokepress]

I used to work at a company that produced medical software . At customer sites, they actually had monochrome LCD monitors that were used in radiological contexts.

[@jayschneiderman2866]

There are a few factors in play. The first two Mac II machines, the II and IIx, were introduced in 87 and 88. The AppleColor High-Resolution RGB was released alongside the Mac II in 87. These were large (6 expansion slots) and expensive machines. In 89, Apple released the Mac IIcx and IIci. These were meant as a more affordable and smaller (3 expansion slots instead of 6) option for the Mac II lineup. Alongside, they released the Apple High-Resolution Monochrome (what you have), Macintosh Two-Page Monochrome, and Macintosh Portrait Display. This trio of monochrome monitors was to cater to the above-mentioned market segments that didn't need color but wanted power but didn't want to break the bank (or their desks). Also of note is that Mac OS supported multiple monitors natively with the release of the Mac II line, so it was relatively easy to have a main color display and a secondary black and white display. One large market segment that the Mac II line aimed at but didn't need color graphics but high-quality displays was the publishing industry for items with no to little colors, such as daily newspapers and books. WYSIWYG publishing programs were considered by many as the "killer app" for Macs. This needed larger screens and often more memory and processing power than was available in the compact/classic Macs. Another market was the software development market. As most Macs at the time were compact/classic Macs, many software developers only put out programs in black and white. I saw both use cases back in the late 80s and early 90s. Unless you wanted to risk the CRT-related hazards inside the Mac SE and SE/30 (which had one expansion slot) for a few years, your only option with expandability was the Mac II for a few years. With its single expansion slot, the Mac LC wasn't released until 1990. It paled in comparison to the contemporary Mac II's in terms of computational power and was sold mostly on the educational market.

[@davidhalliday7776]

Mono monitors had one massive advantage. They were always much crisper as he did not need the shadow mask.

[@vanderaj]

I worked in a reseller back when these things were new, and they were often bought by companies looking to save a few bucks on the Trinitron alternative. I installed a fair few in my time. They were also pretty easy on the eye, and if you were upgrading from a Mac Plus or SE to a modular Mac like the Mac II or IIci, it felt like a bit more real estate with the same look and feel. A lot of Mac software at the time worked very well on 640 x 480, as they had to cope with 512 x 384 screens of the original Macs, so it wasn't as cramped as you might think from such a low resolution to the modern user who is used to a 2k screen.

[@thearam]

I had the monochrome Apple Portrait Display for a while and it was terrific for writing and desktop publishing. Used it with my dad's IIci. Weighed a ton (though not as much as the two-page version), but it awesome.

[@TheDefpom]

We had a Mac II, later motherboard swapped to be a IIx, had a special video card and we had a 15” monitor, later upgraded to a 21”, had the Apple scanner and LaserWriter II as well, was used from printing and typesetting. Mac originally came with a 20MB HD and 8MB RAM, was upgraded later to 40MB HD and I think 12 MB RAM, I ended up selling that machine about 25 years ago.

[@dennisp.2147]

All the graphics guys who used the Mac II family at my former employer ( a Fortune 500 Defense company) used the big 21" Radius monitors. Some of them held onto those machines well into the late 90's.

[@markhollis5850]

These monitors were used extensively in DTP, where you were not printing color. So I know of one newspaper in British Columbia that used lots of these for layout. And, of course, the newspaper had no color ads. The full-page display was a wide display put on its side, so the raster was drawn from bottom to top for each line.

[@michaelmiller3012]

My big surprise in High School in the early 90's was the desktop publishing Mac II - it had the LaserWriter II printer and a Page-View monochrome monitor. The monitor was literally tall and narrow to properly display an image like an 8.5x11 sheet of paper. The Monochrome picture was also remarkably sharp.

[@tambarskelfir]

Monochrome high res monitor like this one is so much sharper and easier to read than an equivalent color monitor. For any kind of job where you have to watch narrow lines or text, this monitor fills that niche. Be it DTP, word processing, music notation, programming etc.

[@smiccick]

They are very common at newspapers. In the '90s I worked as tech support for a local newspaper, and they all have full page and high-res monochrome displays on their Macs and mostly ran Aldus PageMaker 4.

[@scottcall7207]

I worked for an ISP that had the local newspaper as a client in the mid 90s and almost all of their computers had B&W paper white CRTs for their Quark work.

[@AKATenn]

I remember using a portrait version of a high res monochrome monitor, and the text was so nice on it, i always tried to re-create it at home and was never able to, it's as close as you could get to what we'd call e-ink screens while using a CRT back in the early 90s... they did display a full page of text, and everyone at the school i went to wanted to use it.

[@KC-gu2ms]

23:30 - The Xerox Alto had a vertical display in the 70s. Xerox also had a famous visitor who got very "inspired" by that machine.

[@InssiAjaton]

So very interesting things to learn! A part time Engineer at our company wrote a manual using his own, original single box Mac and we were curious about its apparent high, crispy resolution. I never had any Mac, until a couple years ago, when I got a Mac Book for some support of my iPad Mini. But my early computers were a self assembled CP/M box, followed by an HP-87 and a NEC laptop, all monochrome. Then came the era of colors. The absolute top of my short time CRT "life" was a Nokia 21 inch unit. When I heard that Nokia was getting out of the joint (with Sony) CRT business, I found somewhere two second hand Nokia monitors, just for spares. At some point, my space concerns overwhelmed my love of the wide and smooth color rendition of the Nokia screens, and I got my first color LCD monitor. I forced myself into a conclusion that it was just good enough for my non-artist kind of work. That, even when I have done a certain amount of editing my photos. But I still don't have room for taking one of the Nokia CRT monitors back from outside storage -- and two the 3 I had to dump at Goodwill already many years ago, again for space reasons.

[@FloatingFatMan]

I worked in independant Apple dealer in the UK back with this was released, and we only ever sold the official Apple displays with them, mostly the monochrome one due to the cost. In over a year of selling them, I never saw anyone use a generic VGA display. In fact, I vaguely recall something in the documentation about only Apple displays being compatible...

[@MisterZealot]

Late '80s or early x90s my mom worked in a printing business and they used the kind of vertical monochrome monitors Adrian mentions so I guess there was a nitche market for them in that kind of line of work.

[@sithanas]

Like some of the other comments have said, I personally saw this display in use as a desktop publishing monitor--it was the second screen for proofing while the primary was one of the 13" color units. They were good alternatives to the expensive Pivot displays.

[@kargaroc386]

You know, the interesting thing with 8-bit monochrome is, its basically equivalent to modern 24-bit color, but just monochrome. So you'll still have lots of shades of gray with no banding or dithering. Also, because each pixel is still 1 byte (instead of 3, or multiple pixels packed into a byte), pixel-level addressing is as simple as it gets, and you can still write up to 4 pixels with a single 32-bit write if you needed to, so it both looks good and is really fast.

[@JamieStuff]

Being a working adult through this time period, I remember these (mono VGA) monitors well.I picked up a "paper white VGA" monitor for my Fidonet BBS (my old PC), and fell in love with it. Since most of my computing was done in text, I ended up doing a lot of my work with that monochrome monitor. It was so much easier on the eyes.

[@danaeckel5523]

This is the exact setup we had in highschool until I graduated in 95. We had an appletalk network and the IIe systems could boot off of it. The IIci was the server for the network.

[@chaerther]

At the yellow pages we had a floor full of 19" monochrome monitors for reps to view ad copy. ('back in my day we didn't have fancy internet machines, and we liked it!')

[@thehandygeek922]

That’s me! In the early 90s I really wanted a Mac II system to replace my IIGS. However, as we know those systems were really expensive. Even with a decent job. Along came the IIsi. The opportunity came along but still couldn’t afford a colour monitor so I went with the 12” monochrome. It was still $6000 CAD. I was mostly programming with it so the colour wasn’t an issue. Those days 12 and 13 inch monitors were still most common.

[@BollingHolt]

The first Macintosh I ever saw was a Macintosh II with that monochrome monitor. I was probably 7 or 8 years old, still using a CoCo 2, and when my uncle brought this setup home from work, I was absolutely FLOORED at seeing what this magical machine could do! A short while later, he got the color monitor. Macs were out of the price range my dad was willing to spend on computers for me, so I ended up transitioning to the PC world. I still remember the awe I felt over these unattainable Macs, and I think that's why when I started collecting retro machines, most of what I pursue are Macs from this era. I still have the same feeling I remember as a child, and I'm getting to finally realize this childhood dream of owning these machines.

[@TheDefpom]

An interesting bit of info for you, the monitor connector used on this is exactly the same as the internal monitor connector on the original colour CRT iMacs, I did several conversions on those when the fly back transformer died (was very common failure) I gutted them and put them in mini atx cases, converted the monitor output to VGA and converted the slot loading cd drive to be a full size IDE drive.

[@WalterFrancis]

There weren't a ton of Macs at my University around 1990, but all the ones I saw had the tall monitor and the only people that ever used them were doing newspaper or journalism. Even writing papers etc everyone was doing on PCs at that time. Before then; they were doing it on the student Prime system on termies. :D

[@AndrewHelgeCox]

I had the 12" 1 bit per pixel monochrome paper white display for my Atari STe and it was beautiful. It would only do high resolution mode and games didn't run on it but for productivity apps it was head and shoulders above the colour alternative. Its 70hz refresh rate and long persistence phosphor made it very easy on the eyes.

[@SteveGuidi]

A C64 buddy of mine was introduced to a Mac II SI in the early 90s; his father bought it and used it to manage his business. It had the Trinitron monitor and the display was crisp and beautiful. That machine was incredible and would have put my friend's C64 permanently in the closet, except we were limited to using Shareware software due to pricing of commercial programming and graphics software. So we used the computer to transfer data with the higher-speed modem, play the odd free-ish game, and convert graphics and sounds to formats that were usable on a C64 for other projects.

[@wesley00042]

My aunt used to do typesetting and had a IIx with the color monitor and a monochrome vertical full-page monitor.

[@FadkinsDiet]

The graphics toolkit native to the compact Macintoshes (QuickDraw) had native support for 8 colors including black and white, although each except white would all be displayed as black on screen. If you had a color printer, you could create color graphics with the right software, although editing was extremely difficult, for obvious reasons. There was a product to add an external monitor to an SE or Plus using a SCSI adapter. Very slow and used up a lot of RAM. It supported color, but that was not really worth it because you could only get those eight colors.

[@DarrenHughes-Hybrid]

That industrial design was called "Snow White Design Language". It started with the Apple IIc.

[@chubbyadler3276]

I don't know if you know this, but the Xerox minicomputer from back in the 1970s that the Macintosh (and Windows) GUI was inspired from actually did have a vertical mono CRT that was used for document work.

[@jeremyerwin2779]

In my high school computer lab, the lone Mac II was used as a file server, and had a monochrome monitor. (The remainder were Mac Pluses)

[@Psychlist1972]

Back in 1990, my college had a bunch of Sun workstations. Those had the vertical-mode CRTs, grayscale. Not sure which came first.

[@loganjorgensen]

People love color but when it came to basic productivity software not a lot of it required more than monochrome to function. And the price of pushing towards higher and higher resolutions was SO expensive in the past, even I noticed that not being PC owner yet back then. A lot of my graphics research into multimedia content and speculating on it coming sooner hinges on monochrome use just to get the visual clarity better but also the memory footprint file size compatible for retro hardware platform limits. It's easy to take for granted just how uphill many of the features we enjoy so easily now were when trying to do them in the past with the component cost rates of that time period. For example just having Windows running in 640x480x16 in greyscale was a milestone for some people. Also if you're completely color blind what good is a color monitor?😄

[@bigrichc8265]

Learn something new everytime I watch a video! This might sound weird but I also use your videos to get to sleep I just let them play back to back

[@tedthrasher9433]

I never saw that format grayscale monitor (which I believe is how Apple referred to it instead of monochrome), but for desktop publishing in high school we had a Mac II with the full page display that you showed the picture of. I went from an Apple IIGS to a Mac IIci in college and although I had the color monitor, if I were using something like telnet to connect to another computer, I would often switch to 1 bit color mode (b&w) because it was so much faster than running in color.

[@Peter_S_]

Yes, those monitors were pretty common in server closets and server rooms. I installed a ton of them and I cringe now remembering repairing one in Apple service tech training. I also recall a few of them on secretarial machines too when the graphic designers needed the color but secretarial duties didn't justify the cost.

[@zxuiji]

I can think of a reason, newspaper companies, they might've wanted to kit out all their editors with "high res" monitors on the cheap, the editors would not need to see the images/photos in colour to place them where ever they though was best in relation to the content, it's not as if the underlying files would suddenly loose colour and print incorrectly when the final pages were sent to the printers

[@danmenes3143]

In the late 80s/early 90s, many people in desktop publishing preferred monochrome monitors over color because the lack of a shadow mask meant the monochrome monitor had a much sharper image. The monochrome monitor was felt to give a better rendering of a (black-and-white) printed page, and to be less fatiguing to use all day. In the later 1990s, I edited a college paper on a mac using a (presumably very expensive) high-resolution portrait format black-and-white monitor by Radius, if memory serves. It seems strange today that monochrome would have been preferred for a graphics-intensive application, but remember that, at that time, the printed product was likely to be black-and-white as four-color process printing was still relatively expensive.

[@jazzdirt]

Me: "Dad, why do we have a monochrome monitor?" Father: "Because this computer is not for gaming son!"

[@anji623]

My middle school computer lab only had monochrome Apple monitors, possibly these ones. The computers were quite obsolete even though it was the mid 90s. Never used a color monitor until my Dad brought home a Packard Bell in 1996 lol.

[@POVwithRC]

"Can you imagine a Mac product with the power switch on the back?" Studio and Mini would like a word 😉

[@alextirrellRI]

I had one of these displays around 1998, used with a IIsi. It was my first computer that was mine outside of our family Mac Classic. It was a handmedown setup, probably a warehouse find at my dad's workplace. Not sure what the original owner's intent was for it.

[@RaJ2986]

I didn't even know there was a low-budget monitor for the IIci because they were pushing color displays so hard. Our school at the time jumped from the Apple IIe/GS series w/green monochrome displays to the LC II and LC III with the 12" RGB displays.

[@Charlesb88]

The price of the Apple high resolution VGA monitor was around $1650 while the High Resolution Monochrome monitor sold for around $900. That meant the monochrome monitor was around half the cost of the VGA model. The monochrome model was sold from 1990-91 with the high-res VGA model being sold from 1987-‘92, (4 yrs longer).

[@bradnelson3595]

Another aspect I just thought of, Adrian, is that a working in grayscale in apps is going to produce faster scrolling, zooming, and screen redraws. Remember, back in the day the hardware always seemed to be a generation or so behind what the software could do. That meant slooooow performance. If you didn't absolutely need color, grayscale could be a plus simply because of the speed.

[@HammondDirk]

At my father's work at the time (around 1990) they used Mac SEs, but the boss had a Macinstosh II (the big box) with this 640x480 monochrome screen (I remember that as a kid I was surprised that the screen was a bit larger than those of the SEs, but the things on the screen had the same size, there was just a bit more room, because it had a slightly higher resolution). I guess in that company, nobody was interested in color at all, the printer they had was a laser writer, also black and white.

[@kaitlyn__L]

AIUI, some industries (especially desktop publishing) demanded the monochrome option because, as good as the dot pitch on the colour one was, this was still sharper for text? The guy responsible for inserting photos in the page usually had a colour one, but everyone else making page layouts had monochrome ones. This is just based on Computer Chronicles discussion, not personal experiences!

[@VorpalGun]

For full page displays, the Xerox Alto had a vertical display, not sure if it was high Enough DPI or large enough though.

[@GuillermoFrontera]

Exactly, also the Alto was the first computer with ethernet, a Graphical user Interface and a mouse.

[@rabidbigdog]

The IIci was (and still is) their best-ever product. Good ones cost a fortune. AU/X is a joy on it too.

[@rabidbigdog]

The 'design language' was called Snow White wasn't it?

[@SidneyCritic]

The old 1973 Xerox Alto had vertical screens.

[@raycreveling1583]

Hi res mono monitors were still being used in pre-press systems when I started in the mid 90's WYSIWIG was just becoming the norm and we worked with the color separated files. Making sure the right text was on the right plate doesn't require color.

[@sendark001]

A wall full of these showing some dithered art would be awesome

[@TheErador]

I can see the appeal of the bigger 21" mono displays as they were sharp AF, I had the privilege of seeing one in action at some point int he 90s.

[@P5ychoFox]

I’ve never owned an Apple computer but I’m a big fan of this design aesthetic. Those lines and the way the monitor fits perfectly on the computer is so good.

[@FrustratedApe]

The 12" Apple monitors (I think these were Sony Trinitron CRT?) also fitted perfectly on the LC/LCII/LCIII/LC475 pizza box case, the 14" Apple display's (with Trinitron CRT) foot was also shaped to match the pizza box case.

[@argoneum]

Remember getting a color monitor after having a monochrome VGA at home. Both were capable of running 800x600, but monochrome had way sharper image, despite the color one having really fine dot pitch and 85Hz refresh rate (monochrome was 60Hz). Was amazed how sharp the image was each time I came back home. Unfortunately our cat broke it (literally, she jumped on it with such force that it fell and broke).

[@tetsujin_144]

Monochrome is the best chrome!

[@ReinMixTape]

My very first computer experience was on an Apple Mac Performa 450 that my mom and dad got for the family. We would get the Apple Mac magazine which came with game demos, like Prince of Persia etc. Oh boy did I play that a lot (and fail), but my favorite Apple Mac game of the time was... 'Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?'. That was a fun game for the time. The classic macs had quite the personality.

[@joshonthetube]

When you mentioned that it only supported 640x480, that reminds me of something I saw back in the day- there was some INIT/CDEV you could load that, at least on the applecolor monitor, would give you a few more pixels, by using the overscan region. I can't remember the name of it right now, but when someone showed it to me (the desktop would suddenly enlarge as it booted), it blew my mind :)

[@adriansdigitalbasement2]

That's fascinating if true. AFAIK the Mac IIci hardware is just not capable of doing anything beyond 640x480. Clearly showing 16 colors there is enough video memory available for more pixels, but it seems like the display interface is hard coded in hardware.

[@joshonthetube]

@@adriansdigitalbasement2 Huh, just replied to this, but it looks like my reply got eaten by youtube (maybe because i put a URL in it)- anyway, I think the program was MaxAppleZoom- that appears to match what I can remember.

[@Peter_S_]

@@adriansdigitalbasement2 Your channel stirs the oddest of memories. I do remember MAZ or MaxAppleZoom which was not uncommon at all to find on machines in San Francisco and it only supported the standard Macintosh Display Cards with the black metal canned PGA and the Bt453 RAMDAC. I have a very foggy memory of upgrading a server from a IIcx to a IIci and the admin was upset the new machine had a smaller screen because it didn't support MAZ.

[@tim1724]

@@adriansdigitalbasement2 Yes, the built-in video on the IIci (and a few other Macintosh II models) is limited to 640x480. The MaxAppleZoom software only worked with a few NuBus cards (including the ones bundled with the early Macintosh II models): Macintosh II Video Card, Macintosh II High Resolution Video Card, Macintosh Display Card 4•8, and Macintosh Display Card 8•24.

[@adriansdigitalbasement2]

@@tim1724 Ah neat. I could see that -- the IIci's video hardware is very tightly coupled into the motherboard's chipset, but an external card could certainly be much more flexible.

[@Clavichordist]

That display's geometry is quite good and I would leave it well enough alone. The unsquare geometry of the display can also be caused by where the intended market is or was for this display. While at Visual Technology, I used templates cut into the shape of an image and angled a certain way, to check the geometry for displays that were destined for various places in the world. For displays heading to Sydney Australia in the southern hemisphere, for example, the image really had to be twisted so that the image was squared up as it should be when the unit was powered on there. The same was true for terminals manufactured in Taiwan. They had specific templates for the northern hemisphere for US and Canada and another for Europe so that when the displays arrived from Taiwan, they were usable by the customers in those locations.

[@beauslim]

I remember in the early 90s that many programmers preferred monochrome. They claimed the clarity of text reduced eye strain.

[@tenminutetokyo2643]

The 12” Monochrome model that came out with the LC was even better. It was so small and compact. In 1990 I was starting college and charged a $5,000 IIci on my credit card. Took 4 years to pay it off.

[@Peter_S_]

That 12" monochrome with the LC monitor was only 512 x 384. I would much rather have the 640 x 480 screen real estate.

[@bobris]

What a blast of nostalgia. We ended up with that same supercom monitor somehow. I remember trying unsupported resolutions with it and making it squeal. It was a workhorse!

[@adriansdigitalbasement2]

I don't recall what happened to mine. It ended up getting a bad solder joint so it would cut out unless I hit the side, but I actually took it apart to find the problem and I fixed it. My first circuit level repair probably!! Would have been at some point in the 90s.

[@AndrewTubbiolo]

I used Hercules Monochrome all the way until 1995. I ran DOS of course, Windoze 3.1, and Linux X windows. Worked great. Nice crisp high resolution graphics. Got my first paper white VGA in 1994, but still kept that Hercules going on my older machine with complete satisfaction.

[@j0eCommodore]

Early day Desktop Publishing was big - if they were newspapers monochrome was all they needed (or they only needed color for working up just the color plates, so most staff may not need one), DTP apps and PhotoShop would have been very popular, paired with B&W scanners. Also if you were doing business work with macs and didn't need color monochrome was fine.

[@JLP802]

It's for graphic designers who were making ads for newspapers or the phone book that were just black and white anyway.

[@tarajoe07]

I witnessed these used for a newspaper back in the day

[@fluffycritter]

7:45 "Can you imagine a power switch being on the back of an Apple device at this point? Pretty hilarious." My Mac mini and Mac studio both say "hi"

[@adriansdigitalbasement2]

You can turn those on from the keyboard though? Or is that not a thing anymore... I haven't used any modern non-laptop Mac to know.

[@fluffycritter]

@@adriansdigitalbasement2 It has been ages since desktop Macs supported keyboard-based power control.

[@N4BUT]

We used these for desktop publishing in college in 1992

[@orionfl79]

I remember in grammar school Apple had this weird program where if the students turned in a certain number of cereal box tops they'd donate computers to the school. This was like maybe 1985 to 1990-ish but I remember for the most part we had this weird combination of Commodore 64s that were slowly being replaced by Apple II's then later on a couple of Macs started showing up. For the life of me, I can't remember the model but I can say for sure they were a smaller pizza box style with some sort of Apple II emulator boards in them and they did have those same monochrome monitors. Incidentally, they wound up putting in one of those Apple II like machines with the carrying handle and the 3.5" disk drives in the library and I'm pretty sure that too used one of those monochrome displays.

[@tim1724]

The pizza box Macs that could hold an Apple IIe card were the Macintosh LC series.

[@orionfl79]

@@tim1724 YES! I just looked up that model and that's exactly what they were! ^_^

[@tetsujin_144]

6:20 - "I have a feeling that this monochrome monitor was probably as expensive as plenty of comparable color monitors" Seems like. From the info I found it originally sold (in 1989) for around $900, while VGA color monitors (listed in the 1989 Tandy computer catalog) were around $500-$600 (depending on dot pitch, etc.)

[@adriansdigitalbasement2]

I did some reading and it seems that on the IIci at least, it doesn't output H and V sync signals while in color mode, so a small active adapter would be needed to convert the C-Sync signal to work on VGA monitors. I should try building up such a circuit to see how it might work.

[@thepresi2]

I truly appreciate the overview intro and historical context of the device! You are pretty good at it!

[@massmike11]

I had a mac IIsi. It wasn’t really super powerful but I really loved that computer.

[@AussieBloke6502]

Adrian mentioned the Mac IIci uses the same design language as the Apple IIc, but didn't recall its name. It is called Snow White, by Frog Design. Note, that name does NOT describe the color shade of the plastic, actually that off-white color is named "Fog" (and is of course one component of the Snow White design language definition).

[@AndrewHelgeCox]

I remember looking often at a monochrome potrait display in a shop on Tottenham Court Road that always advertised in the UK PC magazines but i saely could not afford to buy it.

[@KAPTKipper]

I have one of those 13" colour monitors, but lack the DB-15 pin cable. I use an adapter and a VGA crt. I was hoping to use it with my Apple IIGS, but I found out the IIGS is 15Khz only, which the monitor doesn't support. Mono monitors were mostly used in Desktop Publishing

[@ericpaul4575]

People chose this monitor as it was cheaper, as I did for my first LCII.

[@jackilynpyzocha662]

I had an SE, for $50.00, it ran 7.5 OS, it had software included, locally.

[@Cherijo78]

I strongly prefer this style of white monochrome for text editing. It is so much easier on my eyes then modern LCD screens are even. This is part of why there's a push for good e. Ink displays that can refresh a good resolutions. They are so much better on the eyes than LCDs or these CRTs because there's no backlight. Still, I would take this monitor today in a heartbeat over a color one for text entry purposes.

[@ChrisB...]

My HS bought 6 of these Mac II's for the yearbook staff in 88, I saw the bill and my jaw hit the floor.

[@button-puncher]

Extron cables are the ones I love for analog RGB. They made them with pretty much any connector. VGA, SGI, Apple, and 5 BNC. Expensive new but the are all over the bay of e. I used to work in pro AV and they were the best. With a P2DA2 you could split a VGA to run it to a local monitor and to a projector. I use one on my test bench at work for the oddball server that only has a VGA connector. Thanks for another great video!

[@parrottm76262]

While most of the pc's at my workplace from that era were IBM clones, we did have a few Macs and they all had monochrome monitors on them.

[@williamsquires3070]

Hi Adrian. Another “pro” of monochrome monitors (or TVs) is serviceability; the circuitry is simpler since you have but one electron gun, and you don’t have the color demodulation stuff. It also meant the picture tubes were easier to manufacture; only one electron gun assy., no color mask, only one color phosphor, and so on. Combined, it meant - for a given diagonal measurement, the monochrome CRT monitor/TV is going to cost less than the same size color monitor/TV.

[@retropuffer2986]

Maybe they bought this monitor as part of a combo special. I remember during this time period there was one specific promotion where if you bought Apple branded keyboard, mouse and monitor then you can get an Apple Laser for 50% off.

[@Peter_S_]

These were just the standard cheap monitor. When a client wanted to upgrade their old file server or font server which was often a cost-off Plus or SE in those days, this is the monitor I would usually spec out as they either bought a new server machine or they rotated one of the designer's machines out with an upgrade and the designer kept their nice monitor.

[@sjgrall]

Thanks for the video. I’ve wondered about the differences between these two monochrome displays. Documentation on the net doesn’t seem to be the best.

[@michaelnitschke9872]

If you had a business like a newspaper or publisher that needed a lot of computers it would make sense for these monitors on a large scale

[@williamsquires3070]

(@7:50 or so). About power switches on the back; I’m pretty sure all the iMacs from the round-base G4 and thereafter had the power switch on the back. The laptops, desktops, and others like the Mac Mini had power switches in more accessible locations. I don’t know if the power switches on the original iMacs (like the Bondi blue one) were on the back also, but maybe so? Never had that model, so I don’t know right off hand.

[@DarrenHughes-Hybrid]

I purchased my first Mac, a Centris 610, with that 13" Apple/Sony Trinitron on a swivel base. It was the best (relative best) monitor I've ever owned.

[@adriansdigitalbasement2]

Yeah all the Sony monitors were just so super good. Pretty much the best you could get in the CRT world ..... I sadly could never afford one, (for the PC or otherwise.) Even now finding a proper VGA compatible Sony monitor is difficult as they are often so well used and worn out.

[@osgeld]

In the (later)mid 90's there was a couple computer surplus stores and one of them had a pallet of Mac 2's, and I was in high school working nights and weekends and they still costed a pretty penny. best I could get was a IIcx the ci models were almost 200 bucks more and I was just to be happy to upgrade from my AT&T xt class machine as they were priced so low they were flying off the skid (this is about the time the first power PC's were popping up in schools everywhere so I assume it was surplus from that) ... I really wanted the ci, but the cx did ok enough with its 16mhz cpu

[@christianlingurar7085]

nonono, don't understimate the relevance of MONOCHROME DTP on those machines, I worked on them, actually I had "my" IIcx with page display, the ad company I was jobbing at got two IIci's on an auction, together with these mono monitors - and they were fantastic! and no, we would NEVER have gotten the color screens at the same price, the mono screens were much better for mono work! the color was just an add-on to the machine, only the boss had a large (19"...) color multisync on his new IIfx. The IIci's were much faster than the IIcx's.

[@christianlingurar7085]

...and the M1050 is lousy. I don't know exactly about the price, but i remember that it was quite common for apple to indicate prices for monitors INCLUDING the corresponding video cards, in fact, that was normal, you chose the video "solution", not the monitor. before "VGA" there was no standard for more than CGA!